spike
Noun pluralspikes
Pluralspikes
- 1
- 2A sudden, brief surge in something such as power or the price of a commodity; any short, sharp change that would show as a peak on a graph.
Drought in the growing regions caused a spike in coffee prices.
A brief voltage spike can damage a computer that isn't on a surge protector.
Similarsurge, jump, rise, increase, leap
Oppositedrop, dip, fall, plunge
Note
The peak on a graph is still behind the word: a spike is brief as well as sudden, the kind of jump that may fall back as quickly as it came. It usually takes in, as in a spike in food prices or a big spike in passenger assistance, and it forms compounds such as price spike.
- 3A pointed piece of metal or other material, set with its point facing up or out.
Rows of iron spikes on the window ledges keep pigeons from landing.
The old castle gate had a spike at the top of every bar.
- 4A kind of very large nail.
Each tie was fastened to the rail with four steel spikes.
He hammered a spike through the beam to hold the frame together.
Similarnail
Note
The word came into English from Old Norse spík, which meant both a spike and a sprig, and before that from a Germanic word for a stick, splinter or point. Its deepest root means "to be pointed", the idea behind the nail and most of the senses that grew from it.
- 5
- 6To add alcohol or a drug to a drink, especially without the drinker knowing.
Police warned customers that several drinks at the bar had been spiked over the weekend.
My uncle likes to spike his eggnog with a splash of rum.
Similarlace, drug, dope, doctor
Note
It takes with for what goes in: spike the punch with rum, spike a drink with a drug. The same verb covers a host's splash of liquor and a crime, so context has to show whether the drinker knew; in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), someone learns only afterward that the Kool-Aid has been "spiked" with LSD.
- 7
- 8In volleyball, to hit the ball from high up, usually above the net, aiming to send it straight down to the opponents' floor or off their blockers' hands.
The outside hitter spiked the ball off the blocker's fingertips and out of bounds.
Coaches teach hitters to spike at the seam between two blockers.
Note
A hitter does not have to beat the block to score: spiking the ball off a blocker's hands so that it lands out of bounds, which players call tooling the block, still wins the point, because the blocking team touched it last. Attack and hit are the plainer words for the same stroke.
- 9In volleyball, an attacking hit made, usually, from above the height of the net, meant to send the ball straight to the opponents' floor or off their blockers' hands.
The setter's perfect lift gave him an easy spike down the line.
Their blockers got a hand on almost every spike in the second set.
Similarsmash
Note
The spike is the finishing blow of a team's run of touches: one player passes the ball up, the setter lifts it near the net, and the hitter jumps and swings down on it. What makes it a spike is the intent to drive the ball down, so a spike that is blocked or dug is still a spike.
- 10A running shoe whose sole is set with sharp points for grip.
Sprinters lace up their spikes just before they settle into the blocks.
He hadn't laced his left spike tightly enough, and it came off in the mud on the first hill.
Note
Like other footwear, the word lives mostly in the plural: a pair of spikes, lacing up your spikes before a race. The singular is kept for one shoe, as when a loosely tied spike comes off in the mud.
- 11The thin, rod-like heel that raises the back of a woman's high-heeled shoe.
One spike snapped clean off as she ran for the train.
The guests' spikes left little dents all over the wooden dance floor.
Similarstiletto
- 12To add a small amount of one substance to another, as when preparing a sample for testing.
Technicians spike each blank sample with a known amount of lead to check the instrument.
The soil had been spiked with nitrogen to see how quickly the plants absorbed it.
Note
Laboratories use the verb without any hint of mischief: nothing is hidden, and the point is usually a test. A water sample spiked with arsenic, mercury and lead in amounts typical of industrial waste lets an analyst check what a method can find, which keeps this well apart from spiking a drink.
- 13In American football, to slam the ball to the ground, usually to celebrate a touchdown, or right after the snap to stop the clock and save time for a trailing team.
Trailing by three, the quarterback rushed his team to the line to spike the ball with four seconds left.
After his first touchdown, the rookie spiked the football so hard it bounced into the stands.
Similarslam
Note
Off the field the phrase means celebrating a success openly, and it is often used as a warning against gloating too soon: "No one is spiking the football yet," Colin Kahl said in 2022. On the field, the clock-stopping spike counts as an incomplete pass, so the offense gives up a down to save the seconds.
- 14To fasten something in place with spikes, which are long, large nails.
Track crews spike the rails to the wooden ties every few feet.
The dock planks were spiked down so the high water could not lift them.
Similarnail
- 15To fit or furnish something with spikes.
Builders spike the ledges of city buildings so pigeons cannot roost there.
His leather jacket was spiked along both shoulders with sharp steel points.
- 16To discard something; especially, to decide not to publish or make public a story or report.
Executives spiked the report after the company threatened to sue.
Editors rarely spike a story this big without a very good reason.
Similarkill, suppress, scrap, shelve, bury
Note
Editors spike reports, interviews and exposés, and reporters say they "got spiked" when their own copy is dropped, as in Sharon Marshall's Tabloid Girl (2010). Outside the trade the verb stretches to any plan cut short: a wartime ear injury spiked one man's hopes of turning professional.
- 17A long nail on which papers are stored by pushing them onto it; by extension, the imagined place where rejected newspaper stories are sent.
The cook pushed each finished order slip down onto the spike beside the grill.
The editor sent the gossip column straight to the spike.
Similarspindle
Note
The newsroom nail has outlived the newsroom habit: a story still ends up on the spike, or is consigned to it, when an editor decides it will not run. The nail itself is also called a spindle. From it comes the verb for killing a story, so a spiked piece is one that was written and then dropped.
- 18To fix something in place by pushing it onto a spike.
She spiked each paid bill on the nail beside the register.
The campers spike chunks of meat on sharpened sticks and hold them over the fire.
Note
Here the spiking is literal, the physical act behind killing a story: in Cyril M. Kornbluth's "The Little Black Bag" (1950), a story is spiked on the "dead" hook. The same verb can be grim, as with Vlad the Impaler, who spiked his victims on stakes arranged in geometric patterns.
- 19A type of flower cluster in which stalkless flowers grow along a single long, unbranched stem.
The plantain's tiny flowers crowd along a slender spike.
Gladiolus flowers open one after another, from the bottom of the spike to the top.
Note
Botanists use the word for one precise arrangement, and the test is the flower stalks: in a true spike the flowers sit directly on the stem, while a cluster whose flowers each have a short stalk of their own is a raceme. Gardeners are looser and call almost any tall, narrow head of flowers a spike.
- 20
- 21To inject a drug into the body with a syringe.
Outreach workers hand out clean syringes so that people who spike do not have to share needles.
He spiked for six years, and the needle marks on his arms never fully faded.
Similarinject
Note
It belongs to the slang of drug use; in medical talk the verb is inject. The drug goes straight into the body by syringe, which keeps this apart from spiking a drink, where the drug is slipped into a glass instead.
- 22In software engineering, a small project that uses the simplest possible program to explore possible solutions to a problem.
The team ran a two-day spike to see whether the new database could handle the load.
Before estimating the feature, we'll do a spike on the payment service's API.
Note
Extreme Programming gave agile teams the term, and the point of a spike is what the team learns, not software it keeps: the code is usually thrown away once the question is answered. Teams do or run a spike, and an architectural spike tests whether one technical approach will work before the real design begins.
- 23A mark on the stage showing where a prop or other item should be placed.
The stagehand set the armchair exactly on its spike before the curtain rose.
Every table leg had its own spike, marked in glow tape for the blackout.
Similarmark
Note
Stage crews mark spikes with small pieces of colored tape, sometimes a different color for each scene, and with glow tape where the lights go down. Whoever moves a piece, an actor or a deckhand, sets it back on its spike, so that a change in the dark still puts everything in its place.
- 24To sabotage a tree by inserting nails that will damage cutting equipment or injure someone if the tree is cut down.
The group threatened to spike every tree in the timber sale to keep the chainsaws out.
Loggers refused to work the stand after learning that someone had spiked the oldest firs.
- 25To block a gun's touch hole with a metal spike hammered into it, preventing the gun from firing.
Rather than let the battery fall to the enemy, the captain ordered his men to spike the guns.
Before retreating, the gunners spiked every cannon they could not drag away.
Similardisable
Note
Muzzle-loading cannon were fired through a small vent, the touch hole, so a nail driven hard into it silenced the gun. Crews forced to retreat spiked the guns they had to leave behind, which is why spike and abandon go together, as in Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game (1990).
- 26An adolescent male deer.
A spike wandered into the yard, its first thin antlers barely showing.
Through the binoculars she counted three does and a spike at the edge of the field.
Note
The name describes the antlers: a young buck's first set is often a single unbranched point on each side, a spike, before later sets branch into tines. Hunters also say spike buck or spikehorn, which make it clear that the animal, not the antler, is meant.
- 27A species of lavender, known in full as spike lavender.
The varnish recipe called for a few drops of oil of spike.
Spike grows wild on the dry, rocky hillsides behind the village.
- 28Another name for an endpin, on a stringed instrument such as a cello.
She pulled out the cello's spike and tightened the screw to hold it.
Halfway through the solo, the spike slipped on the polished floor.
Similarendpin
Note
This is the rod that slides out of the bottom of a cello or double bass and rests on the floor, so that the player can set the instrument's height. Many players fit its tip into a holder or strap so that it does not slip or scratch the floor.
- 29The part of a workhouse, known as the casual ward, that took in vagrants and other homeless people for the night.
Tramps lined up outside the spike every evening, hoping for a bed and a mug of tea.
Dere's tay spikes, and cocoa spikes, and skilly spikes.
1933, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], Down and Out in Paris and LondonNote
Tramps used this word for the casual ward, the part of a workhouse that took in people with nowhere else to sleep for the night. George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) shows them grading the spikes by what they served: "tay spikes, and cocoa spikes, and skilly spikes". Use it of that vanished world, not of a modern shelter.
- 30An Anglican whose high church views and practices are regarded as excessive.
Some of the older parishioners grumbled that the new curate was a bit of a spike.
The college chapel had long been a haven for spikes who loved candles, vestments and plainsong.
Note
Anglicans use it, half teasing and half scornful, for someone at the far high-church end, fond of incense, vestments and Catholic-style ritual. It can be paired with Anglo-Catholic, as in "an Anglo-Catholic spike", and the matching adjective is spiky: a spiky parish.
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Origin
From Middle English spike, spyke, spik, from Old Norse spík (“spike, sprig”), from Proto-Germanic *spīkō (“stick, splinter, point”), from Proto-Indo-European *spey- (“to be pointed; sharp point, stick”). It is cognate with Icelandic spík (“spike”), Swedish spik (“spike, nail”), Dutch spijker (“nail”) and Old English spīcing (“spike”), and with Latin spīca (“ear of corn”), which may have influenced some senses.